The Anthologies: Magic: The Anthologies

By Tahir Shah

During a career of thirty years, Tahir Shah has published dozens of books on travel, exploration, topography, and research, as well as a large body of fiction.

 

Through this extraordinary series of Anthologies, selections from the corpus are arranged by theme, allowing the reader to follow certain threads that are of profound interest to Shah.

 

Spanning a number of distinct genres - in both fiction and non-fiction work - the collections incorporate a wealth of unpublished material. Prefaced by an original introduction, each Anthology provides a lens into a realm that has shaped Shah's own outlook as a bestselling author.

 

Regarded as one of the most prolific and original writers working today, Tahir Shah has a worldwide following. Published in hundreds of editions and in more than thirty languages, his books turn the world back to front and inside out. Seeking to make sense of the hidden underbelly, he illuminates facets of life most writers hardly even realize exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914960826

Book preview

This book is for Misha,

with sincere thanks and love.

The Anthologies:

Africa

Ceremony

Childhood

City

Danger

East

Expedition

Frontier

Hinterland

India

Jinns

Jungle

Magic

Morocco

Nasrudin

People

Quest

South

Taboo

Teaching Stories

By Tahir Shah:

Travel

Trail of Feathers

Travels With Myself

Beyond the Devil’s Teeth

In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

House of the Tiger King

In Arabian Nights

The Caliph’s House

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Journey Through Namibia

Novels

Jinn Hunter: Book One – The Prism

Jinn Hunter: Book Two – The Jinnslayer

Jinn Hunter: Book Three – The Perplexity

Hannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of Man

Hannibal Fogg and the Codex Cartographica

Casablanca Blues

Eye Spy

Godman

Paris Syndrome

Timbuctoo

Midas

Zigzagzone

Nasrudin

Travels With Nasrudin

The Misadventures of the Mystifying Nasrudin

The Peregrinations of the Perplexing Nasrudin

The Voyages and Vicissitudes of Nasrudin

Nasrudin in the Land of Fools

Teaching Stories

The Arabian Nights Adventures

Scorpion Soup

Tales Told to a Melon

The Afghan Notebook

The Caravanserai Stories

Ghoul Brothers

Hourglass

Imaginist

Jinn’s Treasure

Jinnlore

Mellified Man

Skeleton Island

Wellspring

When the Sun Forgot to Rise

Outrunning the Reaper

The Cap of Invisibility

On Backgammon Time

The Wondrous Seed

The Paradise Tree

Mouse House

The Hoopoe’s Flight

The Old Wind

A Treasury of Tales

Daydreams of an Octopus & Other Stories

Miscellaneous

The Reason to Write

Zigzag Think

Being Myself

Research

Cultural Research

The Middle East Bedside Book

Three Essays

Anthologies

The Anthologies

The Clockmaker’s Box

The Tahir Shah Fiction Reader

The Tahir Shah Travel Reader

Edited by

Congress With a Crocodile

A Son of a Son, Volume I

A Son of a Son, Volume II

Screenplays

Casablanca Blues: The Screenplay

Timbuctoo: The Screenplay

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First published by Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd, 2022

THE ANTHOLOGIES: MAGIC

© TAHIR SHAH

Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Visit the author’s website at: www.TahirShah.com

ISBN 978-1-914960-82-6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Introduction

The Great Maharaja Malipasse

He Who Scatters Souls

No Time for Godmen

Nothing Is What It Seems

Flight Into Reality

The Enchanted Fireball

A Time for Miracles

Meeting the Master

Scorpion Soup

Follower for a God

Path of the Sorcerer

The Unicorn’s Tear

Era of Miracles

Houdini

The Cap of Invisibility

The City of Brass

On Godman

Hex of the Blue Witch

Psychic Surgery

The Melon That Would Be King

The Witch

Introduction

An interest in

magic runs through the veins of my family.

In recent generations, my grandfather, The Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, published a volume of research entitled Black and White Magic. Many of his works on topography and travel are suffused with secret ceremonies and magical rituals.

Similarly, my father, the author and thinker Idries Shah, is known for numerous treatises that consider the cultural roots of what he might have described as ‘occult sciences’.

Two of his earlier books addressing such areas – The Secret Lore of Magic and Oriental Magic – were published under his own name. Others were released under the delightfully eccentric pseudonym ‘Arkon Daraul’, whom he listed as a leading Hungarian ethnographer.

My own investigations into magic and magical themes began by accident and certainly not by design. As described in my book Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I studied illusion with an Indian magician in Kolkata while in my twenties. I never planned to publish an account of the time. In doing so, I incurred the wrath of my magician teacher, Hakim Feroze.

My fascination for illusion – the kind of tricks with which Harry Houdini once wowed audiences – is intertwined with something else.

Imagination.

The way I see it, we are all born with an A-grade sense of imagination. But, alas, education eliminates it. Or, at least it does in a great many societies, such as in northern Europe.

In many of the lands in which I have had the fortune to travel and live, I have experienced first-hand belief systems that are still partially, or perfectly, intact.

This is the point at which the Occidental mind tends to cloud over in confusion. It’s because people are challenged in understanding a system which has both elements of magical mystery, and those of rigidity and fact.

As an imaginist of the first order, I myself am drawn to cultures in which a belief in the possibility of magic is preserved. In referencing this, I am using ‘magic’ in a rather free-form sense.

When I spent months in the Upper Amazon with Peru’s Shuar tribe, formerly known for their expertise in shrinking the heads of their enemies, it was their magic that gripped me more than anything else in their extraordinary realm.

The magic they were performing was not so much magic in the conventional sense as magic that sang to the most ancient part of our humanity.

The Shuar believe that the world around us is an illusion – that it simply doesn’t exist – and that, in order to solve problems in this illusory world, we must fly into the ‘real’ world and glean answers awaiting us there.

For the former headshrinkers, the method of flight is allegorical – achieved by taking a hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca.

In the last twenty years and more, I have found myself turning time and again to magical themes, whether in travelogues, or in stories I have written, or even in novels, like Godman.

Through the pages of that novel I allowed myself to run wild in a way I had waited to run wild for years. Few projects have ever afforded me the opportunity to describe the illusions passed off as magic by my godman, The Great Maharaja Malipasse.

Writing the book, I found myself marvelling yet again at the association that we, as humble humans, have with the two parallel varieties of magic.

The first is the magic performed by what we call ‘magicians’, but who are in actual fact illusionists. Yes, of course, children believe in the tricks, but as adults we know full well they’re performing sleights of hand – because we have been taught not to believe.

The second kind of magic tends to be reserved for faith-based situations: a miracle afforded to a saint, or a supernatural deed performed by a godman.

My own deep fascination with magic is rooted in the matter of belief as much as it is in the magical event itself. Whenever I witness an illusionist doing their work, it’s not the magician I look at, but rather the audience.

For, in their eyes, I see reflected a belief that’s deep inside us all – a desperate need to believe… as though by believing in the right way, we are being reunited through a pervasive and ancient alchemy with a part of ourselves that has so often been cut away.

The pages of this short anthology contain a variety of passages from my work, each of them associated with magic in its various forms. Again, I have used the term ‘magic’ in a loose way, because for me there cannot be a rigidity in this subject.

As you read the passages, spare a thought for Pancho, the Shuar warrior who guided me through the cloud forest of Peru.

When I asked him about magic, he paused, regarded me with a sideways glance, and said:

‘Magic is not what people think it is, but it’s something living inside our hearts. To understand what magic is, you must believe it, and never listen to the wind when it whispers about what is real and what is not.’

Tahir Shah

The Great Maharaja Malipasse

The Blackpool Grand

had hosted the crème de la crème of entertainment in its time, from vaudeville to full musical extravaganzas, and even pantomime.

In the theatre’s long history, none had wowed the audience more artfully, or with such finesse, as the maestro of magical delight – The Great Maharaja Malipasse.

The stalls, dress circles, and the boxes full to capacity, the house lights slowly dimmed, and the royal-blue curtains eased apart. Amid an electrifying ambience, the celebrated sorcerer stepped from the shadows into a shaft of dazzling stage light.

The maharaja was cloaked in an emerald-green opera cape, his head crowned in a magnificent turban, adorned with priceless gems.

In absolute silence, and with the audience lost in speechless anticipation, the magician bowed.

Before him, raised to waist height, was a black coffin, its surface festooned with cryptic symbols in silver and gold.